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Originally Posted by the urban politician
So you have clearly come out against the Lucas Museum, then?
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As a matter of principle, yes, I oppose the lakefront site. The Lump by the Lake design did nothing to make me feel better about such a devil's bargain.
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Tell me what your alternative is. Chicago just loses out on a billion dollar museum so that we get to keep what will certainly remain a perpetual parking lot? I'm trying to get my head around why that works out better in your mind.
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Because it's always the same false dichotomy. McCormick Place
has to be right here walling off the lake or Chicago will lose all the big trade fairs. Greektown and Little Italy
have to be wiped out or Chicago will never get a University of Illinois campus. Soldier Field
has to be lobotomized and host an alien life form because the rest rooms are yucky. NMH
has to be allowed to demolish Prentice or it will never build a cancer-curing research institute. One of the world's great Olmsted landscapes
has to be obliterated or Chicago won't get the Olympics.
400,000 square feet would fill nearly 20 percent of the Old Post Office. It could give a new life to McCormick Place Lakeside Center. It could animate two whole blocks of Motor Row landmarks. It could deck over Metra Electric's Weldon Yard. It could be at Michael Reese, at the McCormick truck yards, or somewhere where transit already exists instead of having to be grafted on as an afterthought.
And if Chicago doesn't get this particular billionaire's vanity monument? Well, 75 years from now we won't have to explain
what on earth we were thinking devoting precious lakefront and gobs of public money to an ugly windowless building housing a cineplex and some archives for long-forgotten calendar illustrations.